Conflict and Accommodation Within a Legislative Elite in South Vietnam

I'T HAVE SERVED in Vietnam for more than three years at both the district and the national levels. If there is one thing that I have learned it is that this country has no politics. It has political personalities, and they have created political parties and political groups, but taken together they do not add up to a political system." Extensive as the American involvement in South Vietnam's governmental system has been over the past ten years, it has not been profound.* The remarks of the U. S. official cited above reflect the views of many observers in i969; they resemble those recorded by the present writer in i967 and those of others at earlier periods. Such despair over the future of Vietnam-a despair that dates back to i960has been related to the widely held belief that South Vietnam lacks a noncommunist political system, or the capacity to develop one, that could demonstrate qualities of stability and cohesion in times of turmoil or uncertainty. For the American official, such despair tends to produce an even greater reliance upon the massive developmental bureaucracy that penetrates down to the most elemental level of Vietnamese government and rural society-the only country in which a U. S. Mission has been permitted to undertake such programs. For the scholar, the despair has led to one of three attitudes towards Vietnamese politics: that the only system of politics which deserves Western support is the one constructed by the Viet Cong; that, in the interests of stability, Vietnamese politics must be ignored in favour of developing a strong and efficient administrative system; or that neither an efficient government nor a strong politics can be expected to emerge from the current governmental corruption and political fragmentation and thus save the South Vietnamese from themselves. This article, in contrast, challenges those views of Vietnamese politics which stress its fragmentation at the elite level as an immutable barrier to the emergence of effective non-Communist political organizations and a